A collaborative handbook on how the African past is reconstructed, addressed to historians who must work largely without written records. Opening essays treat history as a human artefact, reinterpreted by each generation as fresh evidence and new social theory arrive, before turning to the disciplines that supply the raw material.

Contributions take up archaeology and the imprecisions of stratigraphy and radiocarbon dating; historical linguistics, where a reconstructed proto-word for goat testifies to ancient herding as surely as an excavated object; human biology and the muddle created by the notion of race; botany and crop domestication; art treated as a visual document; and European-language accounts from the late fifteenth century, whose trading and missionary authors carried obvious prejudices but were present when no other observer was.

Oral evidence runs through the whole. Contributors examine how traditions were gathered, the distorting role of interpreters, the failure to deposit recordings for others to check, and the recovery of voices elite sources ignore.